Terra Nova: The feeling of space

Terra Nova is talking about the feeling of space in different virtual worlds. The discussion focuses on things like camera tracking and proprioception, which makes me think of the papers on embodiment in CVEs that I’ve been reading recently.

However embodiment is used in a couple of ways in the literature. Sometimes it describes the feeling of being in a body, interacting with the virtual space. This is where you can start to think of the avatar as if it were an animal within an environment, and that’s how the term is relevant to the discussion above.

At other times it’s used to describe a user’s avatar as perceived by others in the space. The distinction is: how it feels to be in your (virtual) self vs. how your (virtual) self appears to others. These are so far apart that to call them both “embodiment” confuses me terribly. Is the term really meant to cover both of those things, and if so do we have words for each separately as well?